Battle Tanks 

Uranium mines affected us: there was no release for four months. But we struggle as real heroes and patriots. We’re preparing another “most featured” release powered by arm uranium. We added the team modes to our neat arcade, even Capture The Flag! These modes are playable on each deathmatch map. 95% of code have been finished, just a few more testing is remaining. And as always there is a brand new map! :) Linux geeks could grab code from svn right now (beware of bugs!)

I wrote a complete 3d sound library recently. It’s as abstract as possible, so you can freely use it in your projects. (LGPL license) Still very experimental and subject to change, but already usable. Or maybe wait for release. Anyway feel free to contact me.

Next targets are playing via internet and macosx port. Thank you for your attention :)

Hope next release will gladden Mac users too :)

Next release for windows will use DirectX instead of OpenGL. It will enable hardware acceleration for users w/o vendor drivers or with exotic video cards. Anyway it’s 2-3 times faster than glSDL implementation. Maybe I’ll write my own OpenGL proxy-renderer for SDL sometime, who knows?
Among various improvements and fixes, this release contains new, incremental network protocol using 2-3 times less data than older one.
Also I wrote prototype of the free 3d sound library(HRIR, HRTF and other cryptic stuff), I hope I’d finish it in 2-3 month. 

Battle Tanks editor is available in SVN. Read README-editor.txt !

Do you have 64 bit linux and experience frequent crashes ? It’s known OpenAL problem. Report about that problem to your distro’s bug tracker.
OpenAL MUST BE built WITHOUT MMX support. There’s no performance penalty on modern platforms.
Also you could remove __MMX__ related code by yourself, as I did for debian packages.

As a temporary solution - you could switch off sound with –no-sound command line argument.  (or set disable-music/sound in ~/.btanks/bt.xml )

Debian packages is available here:
http://dump.iof.ru/people/megath/openal/

Annoying xmas-mode could be switched off by

--no-xmas

command line parameter. (or by waiting for 7th of January :)

Good day dear friends! We proudly present the anniversary 16th release of our funny network arcade. In the new version, we have changed… well, everything. Have a look!

First of all, we have released the jerk scripting based on LUA (blames to its inventors).

Then, the game balance is fully recalculated:

• Weapon destruction ranges are reduced.
• Playing as trooper, you can throw grenades and carry nukes (don’t try that at home!)
• Rocket launcher can now carry the rocket trooper—beware of angry launchers!
• Troopers teleport to their carrier if cannot find path.
• Ther submarine launches nuke missiles.
• The player can capture empty cars, drive them and USE HORN! When you are in the civilian vehicle, enemy units will not bother you.

Third, we have added The Arena. This is a coop map where you can test almost all weapons against almost all enemies. (BTW, try a new monster on Arena—the Acid Slime.)

Oh well, and of course we have added some killer machines: a bomber helicopter and Chinook that lands troops—they will both hunt you (see them on Arena). Also the new land unit is introduced—a buggy with MG turret; this is the only unit that can shoot down the helicopter. Beware of falling helis!

Also there are changes to deathmatch; we have added there a respawn in random place. And the new sountrack is composed—specially for this release!

The BT team wishes you the Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and offers the Sensational Christmas Discount on Donations: you get 5¢ discount on all donations made before 7th of January next year!*

* — not applicable to donations made through Sourceforge

We’ve done another big step towards the next release: rebalanced all stuff, reduced bullet ranges, implemented dozen new cool objects and modes (including submarine with ballistic nuke missiles), added lua scripting which can affect almost all stuff on maps.

But now we’ve hardly needed bright ideas for new maps demonstrating power of the new engine :) Feel free to drop a line or two in comments.

This release primarily was targeted at multiplayer improvements and
playability even on poor connections. Added UDP connection for faster
player response, paintball map was redrawn from scratch and millions
fixes. Check it out!
BTW, we’ve got first snow here.today.

Full changelog available here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=543421&group_id=167474